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February 2015 – Lightning Talks

Thanks to everyone who came along last Thursday, we had a great turnout of around 40 people! Thank you to our sponsors (Campaign Monitor, Connect Group and iWeb) and of course Bean enCounter and their team for the fantastic food and drink. The evening was hosted by Natasha and we had four great lightning talks.

Myself and the rest of the organising team would like to thank everyone for their overwhelmingly positive feedback, including a number of fantasticblog posts.

Lightning talks

We’ve included a summary of the talks below and we’ll update the page with coverage (slides/videos) as it comes in.

WebGL: The Future of Web Maps?

Web maps have changed a lot since they first appeared in web browsers in 1993. Currently WebGL (a web graphics library) is the latest trend in plugin-less 2D and 3D web graphics. The talk will examine if web maps will move away from traditional methods to this new approach.

Thymeleaf & Thymesheet

Thymeleaf is a relatively new Java view layer technology which can be used as an alternative to JSP, and lets you code your view layer using “vanilla” HTML, which you can then annotate with custom HTML5 data attributes which tell Thymeleaf how to map your back-end data model onto your HTML. Thymesheet takes this one step further, taking a completely clean HTML file, and mapping the back-end data model onto it using CSS3 selectors. Best of all, Thymesheet lets you do test-driven development (TDD) so you can test every aspect of mapping your Java object model onto your HTML – and, even more crucially, be notified by a failed test when something changes in the HTML that you need to take account of.

How I got here

Over the years I have learnt a lot, but how I have learnt has stayed the same.

We’ll be back!

We raffled off a number of prizes on the night, including a number of books, a JetBrains licence, a GitHub micro plan and finally, a French press with a bag of coffee courtesy of Bean enCounter. Congratulations to our raffle winners!

We’d also like to thank our sponsors, Campaign Monitor, Connect Group and iWeb. Without getting too emotional… our sponsors continue to show a genuine commitment to supporting our event and the local web community. With their support we’ve been able to put on a number of fantastic evenings and build what I feel is an inclusive, welcoming and relaxed atmosphere.

We’ll be back in March with a slight twist. We’re sticking with the social/four lightning talks format. However, we’re going with a show and tell theme. So if you have a piece of work you’re especially proud of, or perhaps a project which presented a number of challenges. We would love for you to share your experience. Get in touch and we’ll get you a slot booked in.